New South Wales Books

The first seven chapters of this book should be a must-read for anyone who is determined to study economics, irrespective of one's socio-political biases. Cause and effect relationships, facts-values-selections, assertions vs. mathematical explanations, and many other topics related to critical thinking are clearly explained. I wish I had access to this book when I was trying to understand the underlying assumptions of microeconomics which my professors simply ignored to explain.

I am now ready to read the remaining 53 chapters of this book as well as reread all my old economics textbooks, including Samuelson's!

This is a great effort.. For those interested in REAL LIFE Economics..not just the usual textbook stuff....Who are the economists , anyway???? REAL people with values and biases that are reflected in their work and opinions. The size of this book maybe intimidating...but once you are in it...is very nice and easy reading stuff.
I think it goes deeper than the average economics book and that you can learn a lot from it. Get it.....

The typical economics primer is a weighty tome whose content is not noted for its ability to inspire its readers. In addition, by adhering to the time-worn principle of treating the subject as a "positive" science, the pretence that it has no political ramifications is carefully crafted. Most who choose to continue their study of economics are thus indoctrinated into the myth of market versus state, and the "impartiality" of economic "scientists". For example, not for a minute is the state's actual role in propping up the "market" given its due consideration -- that would overly complicate matters, and spoil the pretty theoretical models. Conventional economics' public relations work for our political economic system would also suffer.

For those interested in how the real world works, this book offers an introduction to economics like no other. The breadth of its coverage and depth of its discussions put the authors of other conventional texts to shame for their blasé treatments of intensely political issues they describe as "purely economic", as if there could be such a thing. This is Political Economy writ large, and the connectedness of the political and the economic forms the basis of Stretton's revision of the entire corpus of economics.

For an accessible, well-written, and wholly serious treatment of an essential subject, beginners and experienced alike would be hard put to find a better source of its kind.

This is a completely different textbook from the ones flooding the market place of elementary economics education. Steeton is a scholar with a background in the classics and the humanities and brings to economic inquiry a vision lacking in most treatments of the subject. I can not recommend this book enough!

If you enjoy the arts, colonial history,
Greek mythology, drama...it's in there...Keneally weaved all these teams brilliantly to create a masterpiece in my opinion.

This finely crafted work is one of Keneally's most notable. Portraying a man in an agony of moral conflict over his love for a woman convict yet constantly aware of the family left behind in England, The Playmaker addresses human feelings at many levels. Like so many of his books, Keneally has taken figures from history, weaving a plausible tale of the life they might have led. His examination of the mind and heart of Lieutenant Ralph Clark, during the early years of the Port Jackson [Sydney] prison colony, a is deeply moving account. Far from home, these exiled people face disturbing choices. Keneally compares the founders of the Sydney colony with space travellers, isolated in a dangerous situation with limited resources.

Clark's task is the staging of a play in celebration of the king's birthday. Assembling a cast from the convicts, he's confronted with a range of personalities from house maids to forgers. Keneally's research has dredged up backgrounds of these transported felons; the thieves' guild oath is a particularly fine touch. His real talent, however, is in presenting this material through his characters . Each of his figures projects a reality surpassing other writers of historical fiction. While his descriptive narrative may make modern allusions, none of his persona are dragged out of their original time frame. Ralph Clark is particularly well drawn. Keneally has a special talent for presenting us with an 18th Century man's feelings and aspirations as much as it's possible for us to know them.

That this book has been returned to the active sales list is a testament to its value. It should be read by more people. The 18th Century setting is less important than what Keneally has to say about people. Add this book to your shelves with confidence. It's worth more than a single read.

The earliest days of Sydney, Australia, and the prison colony which was its first population center provide a dynamic setting for this ambitious, old-fashioned novel. With a broad scope, grand design, and sensitive treatment of universal themes, it has the weightiness of an epic, but is far more vigorous and more involving than that, with vivid, sympathetic characters who come fully to life.

Transported halfway around the world to a forbidding and alien landscape, men and women prisoners share their personal struggles, providing a vitality and emotional punch one does not often find in fiction. The reader soon discovers that the prisoners are not all that different, of course, from the civil servants and Marines who administer the colony--everyone in Port Jackson (Sydney) is a prisoner in some way or another, be it physical, spiritual, or emotional.

Lt. Ralph Clark's decision to produce George Farquhar's early 18th century comedy, The Recruiting Officer, with an all-prisoner cast leads to many emotional conflicts. Though the play provides the participants with a way to achieve a measure of dignity, they must still bow to the strictures of the colony off stage. Many prisoners wield cruel powers over other prisoners, while Marines and administrators exert power over both the prisoners and the aborigine inhabitants of the area. The restrictions imposed by the church, in the person of Rev. Dick Johnson, aggravate tensions by concentrating on rules of behavior rather than on the human soul.

Against this backdrop of the restrictions on their lives, Keneally's characters are set in high relief, their humanity contrasting sharply with the impersonal forms of government which are imposed upon them. Meticulously depicting 18th century England, its government, its penal system, and its social structure, along with early Australia, its first western inhabitants, the decimation of the aborigine population, and the social conflicts faced by its characters, this is one of Keneally's greatest novels, a timeless story based on real journals, stunning in its effect. Mary Whipple

I read this book seveal years ago, before Keneally's name became so widely known as a result of the success of Schindler's List (the movie). This book stands out in my memory for the great ability to transport us to a different time, place and way of thinking. I found it to have been very skillfully written. I subsequently read other books of his as a result of the pleasure derived from this one and was not disappointed.This book deserves to be more widely known.

It is an excellent educational book with lots of clear and beautiful photos.

This book was extremely helpful to me while I learned all about the fishes at the Aquarium of the Pacific. It is very concise and yet includes every order and family that I ever encountered during my studies. I recommend it wholeheartedly!

This 1995 copyright date assures the reader s/he is getting the latest in deep-sea discoveries. Scientists can gather more information with the latest, quieter cameras. It has photos from the most beautiful to the most grotesque fishes. The text is organized, readable & enjoyable

I once thought that meteorites were hunks of rock from outer space. Not any more! This fascinating book opened a whole new world for me. The easy-to-understand text and accompanying artwork and photographs gave me a new understanding of these messengers from beyond time and space. Who knew they held secrets to the birth of our solar system and to how planets formed? A terrific, well-done book. Meteorites rock!

For Middle and High school students this is an excellent and interesting basic source on meteorites. It is not only informative but visually appealing. Visual learners, like many of our regular students and English as a Second Language young adults will discover learning science content to be an easy task with this title.

This book covers what I would consider all the major aspects of meteorites, including craters. The section on the chemistry of meteors is augmented by extremely useful color coded charts that visually display what is being discussed. Also the book has a very interesting section on the reason that most meteorite falls occur at 4PM (it is due to the rotation of the earth around the sun).
The format of the book is very esthetic, with glossy pages and excellent graphics.
Anyone interested in meteorites, who is not a planetary geologist, should find this book both fascinating and informative.

Jon Cleary is one of the most prolific mystery novelists in the world, and it wouldn't be a surprise to find you've never heard of him. He's probably best known in the States for having written the adventure novel High Road to China, which was made into a Tom Selleck movie. In his native Australia, though, he's best known for a long series of police procedurals featuring Scobie Malone, a Sydney homicide inspector. According to the by the same author section of the front of this book, this is the 17th Scobie Malone mystery, and they're all good, and suspenseful. This one is especially intriguing and enigmatic.

Aussie politics are apparently somewhat dirty, but down under there are lines you don't cross, and political assasination is one of them. When a major Australian politician is gunned down eight months before the Olympics visit Sydney, everyone in politics is a suspect, and there are opportunities galore. Things are complicated for Malone by the involvement of two of his daughters, and his wife, in the Olympic preparations or the coverage of the assassination. Only his son is unentangled. When Scobie and his partner Russ Clements unravel things and begin to zero in on the shooter, this only intensifies the mystery, because no one is clear who hired him.

I enjoy Jon Cleary a great deal. The one thing that may be jarring is his habit of jumping to different points of view, which some may find jarring. I don't, personally, and I enjoy it. I would highly recommend this book.

Australian fiction is the best you will ever find (and I've read everything from King to Koontz) but 99% of books from Down Under are not released here in the United States. Why? I don't know. But I DO know what I've discovered. Jon Cleary's The Bear Pit : A Scobie Malone Mystery is fantastic! I've hunted down more Scobie Malone Mysteries over the internet and they're all great.

Other must reads by Australian authors are:

Any book written by Robert G. Barrett! (The Stephen King of Australia)
Peter Corris' Cliff Hardy stories! (As good as anything written by Nelson DeMille)
Blood Junction by Caroline Carver (As good as anything written by Dean Koontz)
Every book written by Peter Doyle! (Move over John Grisham)

My fellow Americans, fight to read the books the US publishers won't let you see! You will be glad you did.

100 female convicts were sent from England to Sydney on the Princess Royal. Babette Smith has traced the fates of all of them, so far as possible. For a few, she has fascinating detail. Susannah Watson, a forebear of the author's, regarded transportation as the "best thing befell me, except for you children."
Scholarly but full of lively detail and action, this is a remarkable work

This is a splendid history of the women who, in the 1830s, were convicted of various petty (and some not so petty) offenses and shipped off to the convict colonies of early Australia. Many American booksellers still stock "The Fatal Shore," but in many ways this is a more compelling story, not just because of its observations on early Victorian morality but also because of the fascinating, if tragic, story of its central character, Susannah Watson. Great adventure, great history.

While most American schoolchildren in the U.S. are taught of the American Revolution as a glorious struggle of backwoods colonials fighting for their freedom and independence against the world's most powerful empire, few, if any, are taught of the great tragedy experienced by African-Americans, many of them former slaves, who fought with or sided with the British in the hopes that they would secure their individual freedoms. I was one of those many schoolchildren inculcated in the myth of the Revolution, but I have since expanded my knowledge of the Revolution beyond the history texts. Despite this, I was not aware of the globe-circling stories of former slaves of the American Revolution as carefully documented and researched by Cassandra Pybus in "Epic Journeys of Freedom". But now that I am, I hope these stories become more widely known as examples of not only the failure of the American Revolution to live up to its ideals, but more important, as examples of the unquenchable human desire for freedom and the extent to which brave men and women will go to find it.

I cannot do justice to any of the individual stories in "Epic Journeys of Freedom" in this or any review, and much of the immediacy and drama of the stories come from the first-hand sources of the era that Pybus has collected and orchestrated into compelling narratives. By retelling the history of individual lives set within the context of the American Revolution and its aftermath, Pybus reduces a mythic, seminal event in America's founding to a personal level. The eyes through which we see the Revolution, however, belong not to the victors, but to the disenfranchised and dehumanized; America's victory meant their enslavement, so they fled the land of liberty to seek their own freedom across distant borders and oceans.

Some may ask why bring up more stories of America's past injustices when we have come so far in addressing them. We read these stories and remember their lives because they remind us why men and women have risked all and died for their freedom. They remind us of both our worse and better natures, and offer hope for a more just and free world.

The first three "official" reviews of this book fail to convey the sheer original, revealing, even emotional nature of this book. Many Americans now accept that their patriotic Revolutionary ancestors--including the Founding Fathers--owned slaves. Some Americans are aware that many of these slaves fled to the British controlled areas and cities under the promise of gaining freedom. A few Americans may then know of what happened to these former slaves--how many were take off to Nova Scotia with thousands of white Loyalists. What Cassandra Pybus reveals in this book opens all this up into dimensions undreamed of by all but perhaps a literal handful of historians. And in fact, what she presents is more like a nightmare than a dream. In an impeccably researched and footnoted narrative, she first investigates those three relatively "knowns" that I referred to above, providing details that will astound most of us. And when she goes onto present the story of what happenened to most of these former slaves as they movd on not only to Nova Scotia and London but then on to Sierra Leone and Australia--well, it is history as revelation. Although Pybus stays rooted in the strictest procedures of the historian, the end effect is to feel you are reading a novel. But a novel describing events of such unnmitigated misery, of human suffering, of human cruelty, that no novelist would dare invent these happenings. I defy any reader to put the book down saying (a) "Oh, I had suspected all this might have happened" and (b) "In any case I can't see getting especially worked up over it." The end result is a book that both charges far more human beings than we have imagined with being cruel to African-Americans and at the same time informs us of how many of these same African-Americans endured these cruelties and utimately prevailed. In a word, I found it spellbinding!

In this gripping and controversial biography, Anne-Maree Whitaker uncovers the role of Joseph Foveaux, a neglected and sometimes unfairly criticised key figure in the colony's development.

The vivid prose plunges the reader into the worlds in which Foveaux moved: the elaborate milieu of parliamentary politics and patronage in London, and the rough and tumble of the colonies of Norfolk Island and New South Wales where he was lieutenant governor.

We meet the irascible William Bligh, the visionary Lachlan Macquarie, leading colonists including John Macarthur and D'Arcy Wentworth and an enormous cast of supporting characters in Britain and the colonies.

"I have never yet met with any Officer...that is more eminently qualified for forming and conducting to maturity and perfection any infant colony committed to his charge," wrote Governor Macquarie in 1810, praising Joseph Foveaux, the man who had presided over the colony of New South Wales since the controversial Governor Bligh was relieved of his duties two years before.

If you saw any of the Sydney during the Olympics, you are sure to find this account of its early years a fascinating revelation. Based on the life of Lieutenant Governor Joseph Foveaux, demonised in Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, this book reveals the links and patronage networks which held the British empire together. I liked the way the author in each chapter flung the reader into a physical description of the place where the action happens. And I even found myself caring about Foveaux's successes and setbacks. This is a warm, elegantly written and compelling new departure in Australian historical writing.

Both a great reference and a lovely coffee-table book. I gave two to my advisors as graduation thank-you gifts and they were delighted.

The book is a great reference data base of the fascinating Australian orchid flora. Although 'only' a choice of 150 out of some 1200 Australian species is shown this book gives a good impression of what an orchid friend may expect from the Orchidaceae of this continent. Both terrestial and epiphytic species are included. The plants are shown in alphabetical order of the genus, with the species in chronological order of scientific description.

John Riley's drawings of the species are most skillful and combine botanical accuracy with a highly esthetic standard. Every illustration is a masterpiece, showing the plant entirely and its parts in adequate magnification. Thus the reader gets an impression of the plant which is very close to the real view. The presentation of anatomical details allows to identify closely related species. This is useful feature especially in the case of a number of very similar species, for instance within the genus Pterostylis. I have seen several species myself in natura and I can confirm that such a drawing gives more visual information about the plants than a photo often can.

Additional information about the species is given in the accompanying text. It contains data about the distribution, the typical habitat and the state of endangerment. David Banks' text is concise and testifies a great competence in this field.

In summary this book can be recommended all orchid friends. And I hope that the authors will have the time and opportunity to publish some additional volumes of their magnificent work to deliver insight of their intriguing orchid flora to all interested people inside and outside of Australia.

This is a must have for any postharvest researcher especially when dealing with students that have not necessarily had any posharvest training. It gives the basics of postharvest physiology and technology in a simple, non-complicated way. I am an experienced postharvest physiologist but still look things up in it in areas I am less familiar with. There is only one comment I have about it and that is that it is not using SI units throughout the book.

It would be cool is they removed the barcode sticker from the back of the book so that we could read it.